To remain competitive in a global economy requires efficient and effective communications. For example, manufacturers often have suppliers located across the country and around the world. Timely and effective communications between the manufacturer and supplier can be critical to business success. In other cases, companies often assign business projects to work groups with members physically located around the world. In some situations, the work group members can belong to different organizations and/or companies. As with manufacturers and suppliers, timely and effective communication can be critical to the success of the work group.
Face-to-face meetings have been the traditional method of communicating, but with the organizations becoming increasing geographically dispersed, these meetings often require travel on the part of attendees and, thus, are becoming increasingly time and cost prohibitive. With the proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet, in particular, these meetings are increasingly taking place virtually over computer networks through the use of electronic communications technologies, such as web meeting/conferencing and application sharing.
Application sharing typically describes a multi-user collaborative environment in which the screen of one user (the “sharer”) is captured in realtime and transmitted to the other users. Usually, one remote user at a time can take remote control of the sharer's screen and perform mouse and keyboard actions, for example, while all other users—including the owner of the shared machine—watch passively. One problem with traditional application sharing systems is that non-controlling observers cannot look at other parts of the shared application. For example, if the application being shared is a word processing application, and the application is currently controlled by a user to look at a second page of a document, another user of the shared environment cannot “peek” back at the first page without taking control and scrolling the shared view of the document. If the user attempts this, then all other users are relegated to passively watching this activity.